Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

We review macroeconomic performance over the period since the Global Financial Crisis and the challenges in the pursuit of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate. We characterize the use of forward guidance and balance sheet policies after the federal funds rate reached the effective lower bound. We...

In this paper, we analyze coordination of macroeconomic stabilization policies within the EMU by focusing, in a dynamic set-up, on asymmetries, externalities, and the existence of a multi-country context. We study how coalitions among fiscal and monetary authorities are formed and what are their...

We build a time varying DSGE model with financial frictions in order to evaluate changes in the responses of the macroeconomy to financial friction shocks. Using US data, we find that the transmission of the financial friction shock to economic variables, such as output growth, has not changed...

Following Giraitis, Kapetanios, and Yates (2014b), this paper uses kernel methods to estimate a seven variable time-varying (TV) vector autoregressive (VAR) model on the data set constructed by Smets and Wouters (2007). We apply an indirect inference method to map from this TV VAR to time...

This paper summarizes the results of a Survey on Monetary policy Communication conducted among central banks in Central Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and the euro area. The main objective of this Survey was to draw evidence on the level of transparency and communication strategies of the...